DJ Spooky got into DJing like many others -- his natural musical ability
combined with an ever-increasing record collection -- and he took off from
there. But Spooky is unusual in that he is a margin walker -- most DJs
specialize in hip hop, techno, dance hall, or ambient, but Spooky can hang
in every school, pulling influences from each one to form his own sound.
Aside from music, Spooky draws on the insane amount of reading he has done
-- science fiction, philosophy, classical literature, and seemingly
everything else. Burroughs's cut-ups play a part in his mix, and his
moniker "Tha Subliminal Kid" is a bite from Old Bill's Nova Express, a
character who manipulates reality through random recording and cut-up
playback.

"Scratching is reinterpreting the song ... putting your presence into it,"
he told me one night. "You're sort of destroying this received object from
corporate culture and then putting your own take on it. Instead of
receiving as a passive consumer, you begin to transmit."

He went on to draw parallels between gene splicing and DJing; the
"recombinant genetic mix." "The reason I say it's genetic is because sound
is representative of a certain person -- their expression goes out into
it. So you're recombining one person's expression with your own.

"The idea is to have it so subtle that you don't know if it's you
scratching or the record scratching. You blend yourself into it. I put my
own imprints on all these songs, and then change them. In a certain sense
it's beyond computer hacking. It's reality hacking."

At midnight one Monday I sat in a cab cutting through the downtown grid,
closing in on Futur Space. Mixmaster Morris, a prominent ambient DJ from
Europe, was jetting in from London, and Spooky was scheduled to drop
Abstrakt in the back room. DJ Abraxas sat next to me in the back seat. A
globe-roving DJ with a Franciscan-friar haircut and big pants, he's pulled
by promoters all over the world to spin; he has stamped his way through
two passports in the course of his work. He is also the owner of Subtopia
Records, a major techno/trance/ambient outlet on the New York vinyl scene.

"The major labels are trying to keep up with the music, but trends go so
fast," DJ Abraxas said. "Grooves don't stay around long enough for a
corporation to smother them.... By the time a major can get all the
samples cleared, the promo, advertising, and money backing -- it's dead."
It rings of guerrilla warfare: mobile music attack-forces engage and elude
mega-armed corporations in the battle zone of '90s pop culture.

I had talked to Mixmaster Morris for a while before he took the wheels.
His eyes darted about the room as he rocked back and forth in his seat,
burning with electric energy. Countries he was spinning in flew out of his
mouth: Bali, Israel, The Netherlands, England.... He is helping to usher
in ambient music, the smooth, ethereal electronic sound currently breaking
on the Euro scene. After seven years of the pound of techno, the bottom
finally dropped out: the beats have all but disappeared in the cyberstream
mixes produced by programmers like Aphex Twin and the Irresistible Force.

At Futur Space, a doorman checked us off the list and let us into the mix.
Ambient parties have an ex-temporal vibe about them -- like you've walked
into a space that has dropped out of the clock the rest of the world
operates on. As the DJ manipulates the equipment, sending sonic waves
washing over the room, you can almost see the displaced time hanging
suspended in the air in front of your face, swirling with the slow spirals
of cigarette smoke.

Mixmaster Morris was navigating the main room mix. Decked out in a silver
lame kit with matching hat, he tweaked the dials and turntables to provide
the Futur soundtrack.

I walked along the bar to where Spooky was spinning the back room, mixing
on three turntables. He had ambient flow on one, backed by break beats on
another, as he scratched and cut on the third wheel. Film projections
criss-crossed and angled about the room, the tinted, abstract images
bleeding down the walls. On the overstuffed chairs and couches, grouped
together on the floor, the Futur stylers rolled up the buddha and smoked
out to the trance until the room was shrouded in chronic
clouds.